As part of our mission here at Why Daddy Drinks to revel in the humorous lunacy that is fatherhood, and to promote the drinking of quality beverages, we bring you our weekly segment highlighting something that should be in your glass. This is The Drink Of The Weekend.

I just looked back at my most-recent Drink Of The Weekend posting and to call it anything close to “recent” would be a crime. Has it really been two months since I last introduced all of you to something that I chose to drink, and that you should look into for your own liver-killing enjoyment?

It really has…And in that time, the Holiday Season has exploded and ain’t going away. Honestly, from about three days before Thanksgiving until Jan. 2, there is really nothing of note you can get done that doesn’t involve cooking gargantuan pieces of [or entire] delicious animals, blowing your Visa limit on Amazon Christmas Wish Lists, and nearly strangling yourself by stringing lights around your house. I think the government should declare something like they do in France in August and just let the whole country take the last six weeks of the year off so we can get all this stuff done. Plus, it would have the extra bonus of not doing so in France in August.

For us, this season is also complicated by the fact that our older daughter, Maddo, has her birthday on Dec. 22. That’s right. Three days before Christmas. And even with all the chaos of getting a tree and figuring out just where the hell we are going to be on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we have to deal with the logistics of putting on a birthday party for a five-year-old who is VERY AWARE of her birthday. We can’t get out of it, but the insanity of dealing with it now, and butting up against Christmas has to be better than not recognizing the kid’s birthday at all and paying for it in hundreds of “YOU NEVER REALLY LOVED ME!!!”-filled therapy sessions when she’s 17.

We’re doing the same thing as last year, having the party at one of these bouncy house and slide joints where you get two hours of playing and cake eating and then get booted out along with the 16 to 20 kids you invited. But there is something to be said for not having to set things up, not having to deal with Animal House going on in your living room and knocking your tree over, and not having to clean up. It that regard it will be worth every penny.

Now that our kids are in preschool, and meeting more kids, they are getting invited to more and more birthday parties. But, man…I thought we were the outlier when it comes to Christmas-season parties. Between Dec. 8 and our daughter’s birthday Dec. 22, there were/are five different parties to go to. Unfortunately, [or, hell, fortunately for our wallets] we couldn’t make it to all of them. Previous commitments, people coming into town, hell, even two parties at the same time on the same day made it so our presence would be limited to a select few engagements.

One of those was this past Saturday, and near our house. And it was a pretty good gig. The parents rented out some local recreation center, brought in this big bouncy house/slide that the kids loved, had an old-fashioned hot dog station set up and, since the dad was smart, a cooler full of beer.

And pretty good stuff, too. I could tell he had gone to Costco and picked up a case each of the seasonal varieties from Sam Adams and Pyramid…Thankfully, there was not a can of Coors Light around and I didn’t have to break things as a result.

The beer was good, and by the time I polished off three of them and got home, I was in a bit of celebratory mood. We had also just ordered Maddo’s birthday cake and I got a bunch of deep-fried and marinated stuff from a local Hawaiian barbecue place, where everything comes with Hawaii’s national side dishes: rice and macaroni salad. It was Saturday night. I was tired, but feeling OK. And that’s when I went to the beer fridge in the garage and cracked open a Sierra Nevada Celebration Fresh Hop Ale.

I love Christmas and Celebration FHA may be the perfect Christmas beer. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a seasonal ale for the fall and through December. The label looks like something out of one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” stories: a cabin out in the words, snow on the roof and the ground, and surrounded by images of trees and poinsiettas. Of course Pa Ingalls wouldn’t have been beering it up with Half Pint around, but still…The combination of Christmas imagery and 6.8% ABV is cause for celebration for the rest of us.